Archive for Infinite Lives Video

I promise, I’m really trying to not use Infinite Lives as my own professional pinboard these days, but I do have a column about Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Rantou Hen at Vice Motherboard:

The game’s wackiness and camp are superficial. They’re just show. All the while, Bakuretsu’s characters and backdrops hint at something darker. To borrow from Baudrillard, there is a gradual “perversion of reality” until, at last, we are looking at a “facsimile” with “no original copy.”

Really, I’ve never had so much fun writing something in my life. Am I really serious? Who can tell!

I recently moved from San Francisco back to Chicago. And while I was actually born in the Bay Area, I’ve never been so proud a Californian as I’ve been a Chicagoan.

This afternoon I took to my Xbox account, intending to update my Live profile with my new geographical status. And guess what. The Xbox will not let you enter ‘Chicago’ as your location. It’ll let you enter almost anything else—Austin, San Francisco, NYC—but as soon as you type “Chicago” (or “Fuckington, NJ”), it gives you a little pop-up warning.

At least one other Chicagoan has reported he has the same “location glitch” as I have. Et tu? Can you enter “Chicago” as your location in your Xbox profile? Let me know in the comments or in email, because I’d like to make a pie chart.

Update: Kevin Cogger—who is in the know about these sorts of thing—speculates that the trouble is with ”-cago” which, alone, is a crass word in Spanish. Spanish!

Retro Game Challenge, the English-language version of GameCenter CX: Arino no Chosenjou, launched earlier this month in North America. Its sequel is slated for release in Japan on the 26th (tomorrow!).

What follows are six minutes of an intriguing 23-minute program that aired on Japanese television on the 17th. It is meant, in turns, to promote Arino no Chosenjou 2, to give a history of the GameCenter CX television show, and, seemingly, to generate still more interest in the television show’s ongoing localization project.

This weekend, we made it out to San Jose—barely—for this year’s California Extreme, the classic arcade expo. Parkside Hall was crammed with video arcade and pinball machines spanning decades, including some contemporary machines (The Act, anybody?).

Set to the music of the New Pornographers, this shaky-hand footage is from Saturday, July 19.

Last weekend, as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, moviegoers were treated to screenings of Retro Game Master, a lovingly localized version of Game Center CX. I happened to be in the city at that time, so there you are.

I hope it’s OK that I post this—I think the sound of the U.S. audience giggling at Shinya Arino in a theatrical setting is what really makes this so charming.

As for the event itself, the screenings were only half-hour clips, and derived from episodes I’ve already seen (without subtitles, of course), and not many people were there. “But!” I said to Emily Balistrieri, “the real thrill is what it all could mean.”

You can still make Retro Game Master part of your weekend plans:

If you’re in New York City, you can catch an encore presentation of the Retro Game Master episodes. The Mystery of Atlantis episode will be screened Saturday at noon. The Ghosts ‘n Goblins episode airs at noon Sunday and again at 11:30 a.m. July 2. Admission is free.